I posted this link and am surprised to see that it's been flagged. Sean Hogle's interpretation is not at all unreasonable. (I've been an IP lawyer for longer

I posted this link and am surprised to see that it's been flagged. Sean Hogle's interpretation is not at all unreasonable. (I've been an IP lawyer for longer than I care to admit, and I teach a law-school course in contract drafting.) In particular: 1. A court would try to interpret the AWS TOS so as to give effect to all of its provisions. 2. Of the provisions that spdustin cites, [0] the important one says: "We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings ...." (Emphasis added.) 3. I can easily imagine an edge-case scenario: Suppose hypothetically that [i] Amazon's engineers decided that they wanted to borrow an idea or technique or method from a customer's code for use in the AWS feature set, and [ii] they came up with arguments why doing so was supposedly "necessary" to "maintain" or "provide" the Service Offerings. 4. The question would then arise: Does the term "maintain or provide the Service Offerings" encompass the making of improvements to them? Many would say "no," but that would most assuredly not be a slam dunk. Here are two arguments I would make in favor of "yes": A. I haven't taken the time to look, but I would bet money that the term "Service Offering" is defined so that it encompasses AWS's future features as they're developed, not just the existing feature set. This would support the argument that "necessary ... to provide the Service Offerings" encompasses using Your Content to further develop the Service Offerings. B. Enterprise-software customers usually buy maintenance as well as licenses. Traditionally, as long as you're on maintenance, you're entitled to whatever upgrades the vendor releases during your maintenance period. A court would almost certainly consider that as weighing in favor of saying that the term "maintain ... the Service Offerings" encompasses further development. Both A and B above would weigh in favor of interpreting Section 3.2, cited by spdustin, as expressly authorizing Amazon to use Your Content in doing further development of the AWS feature set. Arguments A and B wouldn't be a slam dunk either, in part because of the contra proferentem principle of contract interpretation, which says that other things being equal, an ambiguous contract provision will be construed in favor of the party that didn't draft the provision [1]. But it'd be an expensive proposition for an AWS subscriber to try to duke it out with Amazon on that point. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889449 [1] http://www.commondraft.org/index.html#ContraProf http://www.commondraft.org/index.html#ContraProf